ADHD Chaos Hack: Mastering Your Time Before It Masters You
Having trouble getting a handle on managing time?
Tim shared this story with about a decade ago and, while little booklet-like pocket calendars have largely been replaced by electronic ones on our smartphones and laptops, the advice still sticks.
Tim in Detroit learned the importance of calendars:
One of the things that I never could seem to get a handle on was managing my time. I’d forget appointments, miss project deadlines at work, always turn things in at the last minute in school (even when I finished them). I’d constantly forget even the most simple things like my parents’ birthdays.
Then, when I was about twenty and had gotten a job as the manager of a health food chain store, the regional manager gave me some advice (actually, it was an order) that changed my life.
One day about two weeks after I’d started the job, he was walking me through the store, telling me things he wanted done before he returned in a few weeks. “Move those vitamins up to eye-level and replace the sign,” he’d say, and, “don’t forget to check the raisins every morning to see if they have bugs.” Lots of little details like that, as well as big things like the procedure to transmit the daily sales to the corporate office headquarters.
About halfway through his spiel, he stopped, tilted his head to one side, and said, “You’re not writing this stuff down.”
I told him-as I had told people all my life-that I had a good memory and would remember the things. While that was partially true, what was really true was that I had always believed that everybody else was just born with a great memory, and I somehow missed out on it. I was good at faking it, though, and so although I knew that I forgot things easily, I didn’t want him to know it.
So I was standing there, working as hard as I could to remember the things he was telling me, but knew deep down inside that I’d forget some of them. In the past when that had happened, people would just remind me again, and eventually I’d get everything done. I’d gotten used to people chastising me, and most often they forgave my lapses.
But he wasn’t going to let me get away with it, and he also knew something about the rest of humanity that I didn’t: everybody has a lousy memory, to one extent or another.
He said, “That’s not possible. Everybody forgets things, particularly long lists of things like this, if they don’t write them down. Where’s your calendar?”
“Calendar?” I croaked, thinking of the wall-hanging contraptions decorated with scantily-clad women that my dad used to have on the walls at the garage where he worked.
He marched to the back of the store, rummaged through his briefcase, and pulled out a small pocket calendar with the name of an out-of-state bank printed on the front of it. With a flourish, he slapped it into my hand.
It was about six inches high, two inches wide, and a third of an inch thick: anyplace you opened it, you saw a full week displayed, half on one page and the other half on the facing page. The last dozen pages were for names and addresses.
“That’s a pocket calendar,” he said. “It’s yours now. I want you to keep it with you at all times, and that’s now an official part of your job description. If you don’t do it, I’ll fire you. And I want you to write down everything in your life, from your Christmas card list in the back to the instructions I’m giving you. Write the instructions on the days that I’m telling you to do these things. And every morning and every evening the first and last thing you will do is check that calendar. Along with checking it throughout the day.
“Additionally,” he added, now warming to his job of teacher/Fiihrer, “whenever you get an idea during the day about something you’d like to do to improve this store, I want you to write it down in there. Either put it on a dated page, or choose one of those first few weeks of January that have already passed and designate those pages as your idea file’ pages.”
“Sounds like a lot of unnecessary effort,” I said.
He shook his head, half-smiling and half-angry. “You may think so, but this will make you the kind of store manager I need on my team. In fact, I intend to check your calendar each time I visit your store, and if it’s not up-to-date, I’ll send you home for a few days without pay to get it filled out.”
Having no choice now, I started writing down his instructions as he resumed our walk through the store. That night, I went home and filled in the address pages with the names and addresses of a few dozen friends and relatives. I wrote in birthdays and anniversaries, and for the rest of the year, on each Friday’s page, wrote “send weekly report to head office” and the other things that my manager had told me I must do regularly.
At the time, it seemed like a stupid waste of time. Within a few weeks, though, I realized that I’d never truly known what it meant to be organized with regard to my time and my schedules. I got more done than I ever thought possible, and I rarely missed a deadline or detail.
My manager pulled two sneak visits over the next month, each time only to check my calendar! He was pleased to see that I was keeping it up, and then let me thumb through his. I was amazed at how every day on every page was filled with things. He even kept track of the money he spent while traveling, saying it would help him survive an IRS audit.
I’ve been carrying a pocket calendar like that ever since: it’s been over fifteen years now. Every year I get a free one from someplace, last year it was American Express. The year before, my bank sent them out. The year before that, a calendar company sent me one soliciting my business.
Each Christmas, part of my Christmas Day ritual is to copy my address list and birthdays (I write the birthdays in red, so they jump out) to the next year’s calendar, and put the old one in the back of my underwear drawer. That drawer now has a complete record of my past fifteen years, should I ever need it, and I can honestly say that I owe much of my job success to that little calendar that’s always in my pants or jacket pocket.